Of the students who were still alive, a hand flew up in the darkness. It was his star pupil, Abby, who always sat in the front row taking feverish notes as he spoke. “Professor Byrnes?”

“Yes?”

“Could you make a connection with Irish oppression and African American oppression?”

He nodded, pleased that she followed his line of thinking. “Yes, you could, but you’d have to be careful not to conflate the Irish experience with the systematic oppression of the black diaspora. While the parallels are fascinating, we need to remember these are two different issues.” The old, fun Professor Byrnes would have stopped what he was doing, deviated from the path in an effort to make new discoveries. Hard-nosed Byrnes had to keep it moving because he only had ten minutes left before the class ended. “Good question, Abby.”

She scribbled in her notebook as he returned to the PowerPoint lecture. “As I was saying, the response to Ellison’s work was mixed, but I’d like to think any critic of their time could spot the parallels and jabs he took at the Transcendentalists. Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, to name a few. These were the forefather authors of the American experience. What black writer of the 1950s wouldn’t want to take those early ideas and skewer them?”

Abby’s hand popped up again.

Aiden rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Yes.”

“Could you make a connection between Ellison’s and Melville’s writing styles?” she asked.

He was afraid to venture into this rabbit hole with Abby. She was a smart girl, but she was often scatterbrained with her thoughts, forcing ideas to fit where they couldn’t. Aiden saw poorly connected thoughts in her papers, but he appreciated the creativity that came with those thoughts. Right now, however, he simply didn’t have time. “Which Melville text are you referring to?”

“Moby Dick, of course.”

Aiden drew a deep breath. “Sure, both texts are dealing with an unreliable narrator’s epic journey grappling with forces beyond his control...” He found himself distracted by the boy next to Abby. Despite being in the front row, the young man was in a deep slumber and close to falling out of his chair. “The secondary characters are basically controlling the fate of Ishmael and our invisible narrator. And yes, you could say that the reader reaction to these two texts was wildly inconsistent...”

Abby was in midscribble by the time Aiden trailed off. She looked up with questioning eyes, waiting for him to continue. “Yes?”

Aiden blinked. “Huh?”

“You said ‘wildly inconsistent’ and then you stopped,” the girl said, reading from her paper.

“Billy, wake up,” Aiden said in a sharp voice.

The boy jumped in his seat as his eyes sprang open. “What?”

Without thought, Aiden marched over to the door and flipped the lights on. “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, everyone wake up,” he shouted. Students sat up in their seats with confused expressions. “I’ve paid my dues and gotten my degrees, so I don’t need a review for a take-home exam. What’s your excuse?”